Many software applications are offered as a “suite” of applications. A well-known example is Microsoft Office, available from Microsoft Corp., which comprises, in various offerings, a word processor, a spreadsheet application, a presentation application, a database application, and/or other productivity applications. Another example of an application suite is an business application suite (also referred to herein as an “enterprise application suite,” as a “suite of business applications” or simply as an “application suite,” a “business suite” or an “enterprise suite”), which often will comprise applications to facilitate business management and decision-making at the enterprise level. Such “enterprise applications” (or “business applications”) can include, without limitation, customer relations management (“CRM”) applications, enterprise resource planning (“ERP”) applications, supply chain management applications, and other applications dealing with various finance, accounting, manufacturing, and/or distribution functions, to name but a few examples. An exemplary enterprise application suite is the Oracle eBusiness Suite™, available from Oracle Corp.
In many cases, applications, and in particular, enterprise applications, are provided to users as client-server applications, in which the user operates a client at the user's local computer (usually a PC), while one or more server applications provide data for the client. Merely by way of example, in some cases, the client (or clients) for an enterprise application suite might be executed by and/or within a web browser (e.g., as Java applications), such that any PC with an appropriate web browser can be configured quickly and easily to operate as a client for one or more applications in an enterprise suite.
In addition, as modern software applications have evolved toward increasing interactivity among applications, developers have recognized a need to provide navigation tools to allow users to navigate between various applications within a suite, as several applications may be in use at any given time. Merely by way of example, some web-based enterprise suites offer a “navigator” page that allows a user to navigate between web pages associated with various applications within the suite. These navigator pages, however, are not ideal, since they require a user to navigate away from a given application to the navigator page in order to find a different application page.
Hence, there is a need for a more robust solution to provide navigation among various applications (and/or various components of an application) in a suite of business applications.